Everybody's Autobiography by Gertrude Stein

  I liked the photographers, there is one who came in and said he was sent to do a layout of me. A layout, I said yes he said what is that I said oh he said it is four or five pictures of you doing anything. All right I said what do you want me to do. Why he said there is your airplane bag suppose you unpack it, oh I said Miss Toklas always does that oh no I could not do that, well he said there is the telephone suppose you telephone well I said yes but I never do Miss Toklas always does that, well he said what can you do, well I said I can put my hat on and take my hat off and I can put my coat on and I can take it off and I like water I can drink a glass of water all right he said do that so I did that and he photographed while I did that and the next morning there was the layout and I had done it.

  There was a photographer that was much later in New Orleans and we spent a long time he telling me how he followed Huey Long photographing him and all he knew about him and how they had almost killed him those who were protecting Huey Long and had mistaken him but now Huey Long is dead and it does not make any difference to any one.

  Each one of these hotels was a real hotel to me and the life in them so many people seemed to be sharing something and meeting in numbers and we we were not lost in them each one of them was not like any other one of them. I remember the one in Indianapolis that was a strange one a very strange one one ate pretty well in any one of them but not in the Indianapolis one not very well it was as large the rooms as the furniture in them and the furniture was as heavy in its color as the hangings, mostly in the hotels even later in the Southern ones everything was well not new but new enough but not in that one. Indianapolis was exciting, somehow it was different than Ohio and Illinois later on I could see that in a way it had to do with St. Louis. The size of everything in Indianapolis was different from anything in Ohio or Illinois or Wisconsin or Minnesota entirely a different size, I was tremendously interested in each state I wish well I wish I could know everything about each one. There is Ohio, Louis Bromfield comes from Ohio, they are rich and they are generous and they are innocent and they are prosperous yes they are. But not Indianapolis. I have known a good many from Indiana.

  I lectured in the evening the audience was of men and women the men were able-looking might have been judges and lawyers and they were interested and interesting. The next morning we went to the Foster Museum, everything he had ever done was there a good many in original and all in facsimile and records of all the songs could be made to sing and two secretaries to show everything and the purse that was on him when he was dead and the founder of the museum. It was in a building in a garden. They were moving it to another city where they could build a museum that would look more like a church and then we left and went to see an Indian collection collected by the son of the man who had founded the Foster Museum. Indiana Indianapolis and Indians. He showed us how they were slicing in thin slices the Indian mounds I suppose they have to slice them if they want to know what is inside in them and of course they do want to know what is in them and each one might be different from the one they had had open. Well anyway Indianapolis had not been in any way a disappointment.

  It was Alexander Woollcott who had told us about the Foster Museum. We had met him in New York at a lunch Bennett Cerf gave to have all of us meet all of us and at table we were talking and I said something in contradiction and Alexander Woollcott said Miss Stein you have not been in New York long enough to know that I am never contradicted. We liked being together because we both had poodles and mine we have both seen mine I have not seen his, Woollcott was over last winter and Basket was beautifully washed and shaved to receive him, as he was coming for lunch Monday Basket had to be bathed on Saturday and so for two days we would let Basket not do anything hardly attend to his normal functions because it was raining and the white must not become gray because Basket is the most beautiful white poodle his is not a white one. He is going to write a book about poodles and he asked me to write him a lovely letter about Basket and I did a very lovely one. We liked having Alexander Woollcott here we took him to the ordination of the bishop of Monte Carlo which happened at Notre Dame he is Bernard Faÿ’s uncle this is the second one the second uncle to become a bishop and in benediction Woollcott sent us the largest and the loveliest flowers that Paris has ever given any one. He says he likes to because for many years he always wanted to and now he does. We also liked talking about Mildred Aldrich he had known her and he took us to lunch at Katharine Cornell’s and we did once have the best lemon pie there that was ever made anywhere. I always remember the husband of Katharine Cornell and the Hauptmann trial. Everybody was going there we did not, I like to read detective stories but really not see them, to know what they are but not to sit with them at least I have never sat perhaps I would like it well anyway I did not.

  The husband of Katharine Cornell had gone every day and then he did not go any more, and he said the reason why was that he could not go any more because the day before coming back in the train Mrs. Hauptmann was there in front of him and she said to some one I wonder if it is going to snow or if there is going to be any skating. The naturalness of her saying this thing to some one suddenly made it that he could not go again and he did not go again.

  So we had met Alexander Woollcott and he had told us to go to the Foster Museum.

  I was much interested in passing over Ohio and Indiana. I was much interested in the Ohio country there where it was made of ground that came up to a bit of wood and the farm house in between and then falling down into a piece of meadow. It was interesting that the houses and the barns were well painted in Ohio and over the border in Indiana they were built differently and not on a wooded rising and they were not well painted as they were in Ohio. I know how the houses being built and the taking care of them changes in France from one province to another and there the same was happening from Ohio to Indiana. Afterwards I asked and they told me that many of these farm houses had no electricity that surprised me, in France any farm house or barn has electricity but then in France they live in villages and in America they do not it would be harder to supply every one of those farm houses with electricity but did it not say sometimes that every farm house in America has its telephone and if it has its telephone and radio then it must have its electricity. Well anyway.

  When we were in St. Paul we went to Minneapolis and there I met another doctor whom I had known in the Medical School she and her husband both of them, he Ulrich had been known in those days of the Medical School as the friend of women, well anyway it was not very exciting meeting them again. And then some one told us that Sherwood Anderson was somewhere around. Ah if he was we would see him certainly we would would some one find him and some one did.

  He had a sister-in-law who was married to a doctor in Fall River, Minnesota and Sherwood was traveling around to write what he thought everybody felt about farming that is the farmers. And so we were to meet at his brother-in-law’s. It was winter it certainly was winter and the brother-in-law called for us to drive us out and he put a shovel in and we said what is that for and he said we would see what it was for and we did. They did not shovel us out but they shoveled somebody else out. We had a very pleasant time together. A very good Virginia dinner and a very pleasant evening altogether. They had a rug there made by an old woman in Virginia we liked so much and Sherwood said he would send us one and he did I think it was the same one and we have it in Bilignin and everybody especially French people admire it every time they see it, the pale colors are so American and the river and the house and the simple harmony of it and the taste in it, they all are astonished that they never have seen anything like that before done in America. Lord Berners who has written the music for the ballet pantomime which is to be given in March in London is also going to do the decors and he made a drawing of this carpet and is going to use it as the back drop of the stage, the name of the play is They Must Be Wedded To Their Wife but as the title is too long for advertising we call it A Wedding Bouquet and so we were to fly from St. Paul to Chicago an
d there catch a plane specially stopped for us to Iowa City. This was the only plane we did not like as a plane, the first one did not go at all there was something the matter with the engine and the second plane well it went but perhaps there was something the matter with the engine and then before we came to Chicago certainly we would know Chicago it was beginning to come down. It was a lovely star-lit evening and the plane was commencing to come down. Alice Toklas began to say what are they doing we must get to Chicago to catch the plane for Iowa City and she called the second pilot and she told him. No he said we can’t get to Chicago we are coming right down in Milwaukee and there if you want you can get the train for Chicago but said Alice Toklas indignantly why do you start a plane if it cannot go where it is supposed to go. The plane can go all right he said but no plane can go tonight to Chicago. Why not said Alice Toklas it is a lovely night, may be so he said but lady he said wouldn’t you rather be even in Milwaukee than in your coffin.

  We landed in Milwaukee and we took a train a sort of electric street car to Chicago. I was interested in the passengers there and in the way they read the newspaper. They kind of read their newspaper but it was not really very interesting but when they got to the part about the Quintuplets and how the doctor took care of them then they folded their paper so that they only had that spot and then they settled down to solidly reading. It was interesting to me that that was really the only thing in the paper that was really real to them.

  So then we did get into Chicago and there was a blizzard in Chicago a terrible blizzard in Chicago and we could not find Mrs. Goodspeed’s chauffeur and it was pretty hard to get to the Drake Hotel and he was right no plane could get into Chicago and you never can tell and we did not get to Iowa City. I would like to have seen Iowa. Carl and Cook come from Iowa, you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa. Cook used to tell us about the way the little Presbyterian community of Independence Iowa turned into a wonderful place when the trotting races took place, and of course Maud S. and when I was little everybody knew the horse Maud S. came from there. Well anyway we never did see Iowa.

  So we went to Michigan it was a large plane the largest in which we had been.

  The life of the hotels there was so much that is they did so much in the hotels.

  In Detroit we did not like it in the hotel it was one of the big ones, we did not like any of the rooms they showed us and in the rooms we were to be in we did not know who had come in and out while we were coming in and some one asked Alice Toklas a question and it was a funny one and we did not like it. We were to stay three days but we only stayed one and Jo Brewer telephoned to us and we were glad to see him and the two cars with the staff from Olivet College came and they took us away with them and that was a pleasure. I had walked around a good deal and the place had been foreign that is it was foreign and they called out at every corner through a megaphone where to go and how to go and it was not a pleasant voice it was a policeman and it all might have been anywhere well but not there, I kind of liked it there were back streets that might have been French that is the things they did in them but they were American and therefore they were frightening as French things are not frightening and so after having always driven a Ford car I never have driven any other one there in its home I did not see them at home. This can happen. The food was good which it was not at Olivet not so bad as Vassar but not good but we had a very good time at Olivet.

  It was the first little college we had seen all the rest had been universities and gradually we knew all about colleges and junior colleges and I suppose there will be more kinds and degrees of colleges before we ever get back again but Olivet was the first one that was really a country village and they were boys and girls it sounded like something very pleasant and it looked like something very pleasant and it was something very pleasant.

  We had known Brewer as an Oxford man a friend of Harold Acton, Acton is now a Chinaman, he has been teaching in China a long time and I imagine he really does now really look and feel like a Chinaman some people can and do and he will and does and can.

  Brewer then became a publisher and he published Useful Knowledge for me all the poetry and prose I had at that time done describing America, and then he liked doing everything as well and anyway publishing is like gambling or anything if you do not make money you can lose it and when you lose too much of it you cannot lose any more of it. Well anyway they made Brewer president of Olivet and he was very serious about it any American can be serious when he is serious about it and almost any American can be serious about it, some English people can be serious about what they are serious about but more Americans can be and are and Joe Brewer is and was he is serious about being president of Olivet.

  They were all pleasing and we liked to be with them, we all spent an evening talking and I had to sign my name for all of them and then I asked them all to sign all their names for me. I like names and there were quite a lot of them. And then they all that is the two cars with some of the staff in them drove us to Ann Arbor where I was to lecture. It was nice and cold but not like Wisconsin awfully cold. It was just cold. The country was less American it was more English and French well anyway it was more like anywhere it was less American, the horizon was less American and the houses were interesting and it was there I first saw the shaving advertisements that delighted me one little piece on one board and then further on two more words and then further on two more words a whole lively poem. I wish I could remember more of them, they were all lively and pleasing and they all had to do with shaving like the one when we were young and pleased us about Lo the poor Indian whose untutored mind shaves off his whiskers and disappoints the wind, lots of those that they did two words at a time were better than that I wish I could remember them I liked them so much.

  And so we arrived at Ann Arbor. It was not at all like Olivet, I had no idea it would be such an enormous place with so many students in it. All I really knew about Ann Arbor was that it was there that Avery Hopwood had left his money to found awards for those who were at the university and wanted to write in an original way. Poor Avery he had always wanted to write a great novel he did write something but they destroyed it, probably it was nothing but confusion at least so he said when I used to ask him about it and the man in the English Department who had charge of it asked me what advice could I give him about it. They did not know quite very well how to distribute the prizes.

  The only suggestion I could make them would be that it would be rather amusing if they did with writers the way the Independent salon had done with painters. Suppose they let any one who wanted to write something write it and publish a huge volume of it every year not taking out anything and just see what it would be that they would be printing. But we do do that he said we only take out what is manifestly not worth anything, ah yes I said but that is just it, who is to judge of that manifestly not worth anything. No the thing should be without jury and without reward which was the motto of the first salon d’independence, no one was a judge of what was or was not manifestly worth anything. It would have been rather fun if they had done it, I would have liked to read such a volume, but the minute anybody has judged of any of it anybody might just as well judge of all of it. Of course they have never done it. I do wish they had, it would have been a nice way to please Avery.

  And then we went off in a plane back to Ohio.

  We liked Columbus Ohio, it had a nice climate and it was a pleasant country round about and it had a restaurant where the ladies entertained each other and where they made very good dishes the kind we had read about but good and we were met by a young student, Jean Reeder and a young man with her and they were just like the commère and the compère in a review it was all satisfactory and natural and refreshing. Alice Toklas wanted to come back to live there. She wants to come back to live not everywhere but in Avila and in New York and New Orleans and California, I preferred Chicago and Texas but
I did not want to come back to live there. I like Paris and I like six months in the country but I like Paris. Everybody says it is not very nice now but I like Paris and I like to live there. Just today I saw on the quay three colored prints made in 1840, one of Baltimore one of New Orleans and one of Sacramento. They were twenty-five francs a piece and I did not buy them but I liked looking at them. I like to live in Paris.

  We did like Columbus Ohio. It would seem that a great many years ago a professor of English of the University of Ohio in Columbus came to see me and it had been a pleasure to him and to me. We exchanged a few letters and that was long ago.

  He had taught all his classes to read me and now he was dead, I had not known about this and he was seconded not in his professorship but in his feeling about my work by Sam Steward who had been in Columbus but was now in Helena Montana and would we go there, we never did get there and later he was in the University of the State of Washington and they threw him out because he wrote a book called Angels On The Bough which is a very interesting book. It has something in it that makes literature. I do not know quite what but there it is. That is one of the things that is so perplexing, why do books that are books that do everything why do they not make literature, I do often worry about that, anyway the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors realize this and now he is teaching in the Loyola University of Chicago who also know this thing.